World War I

World War I dramatically changed the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. The magnitude of material destruction and the staggering loss of lives, combined with the use of censorship, propaganda, and new technologies of war, has had repercussions lasting to this day. The Great War has profoundly affected our culture and our politics.

Without it and without the controversial treaty that followed, industrialized killing, shell shock, mass-produced prostheses, a contentiously redrawn Europe, fascism and Nazism, an even more terrible world war, and the United States’ rise as a global power would be difficult to imagine. The Great War truly was “the cataclysmic event of the 20th century.” Despite the war’s distance from the present, the 1914-1918 bloodbath and the revolutions it spawned continue to haunt today’s 21st-century world.